As they lay watching the unearthly orgy at the fire a plan slowly took shape in McElroy’s mind.  They were unbound as they had been for many days, the silent guard proving sufficient surety for their retention, and they were two to one in the wild confusion of the growing excitement.  What easier than a swift grapple in the dusk, one man locked in combat with the sentinel and one lost in the forest and the night?  It was a desperate chance, but they were desperate men with the post, the hatchet, and the matete before them.  As the thought grew it took on proportions of possibility and the factor threw up his head with the old motion, shaking out of his eyes the falling sun-burnt hair.

“M’sieu,” he said, in a low voice, carefully modulated to the careless tone of weary speech which was their habit of nights; “M’sieu, I have a plan.”

The cavalier looked up quickly.

“Ah!” he said; “a plan?  Of what,—­conduct at the stake?  The etiquette of the ceremony of the Feast of Flame?”

“Peace!” replied McElroy sternly; “you jest, M’sieu.  We are in sore straits and a drowning man snatches at straws.  It is this.  The fire of liquor is rising out there.  Hear it in the rising note of the blended voices.  How long, think you, will they be content with the dance and the chanting, the tom-toms and the empty fire?  How long before we are dragged in, to be the centre of affairs?  In this plan of mine there is room for one of us, a bare chance of escape.  This guard behind,—­he is a powerful man, but, with every warrior wild in the circling mass yonder, he might be engaged for the moment needed for one to dart into the darkness and take to the river.  Once there, the mercy of night and bending bushes might aid him.  What think you?”

“Truly ’tis worth the try.  My blood answers the risk.  At the most it would but hasten things.  But give the word and we’ll at it.”

“Nay,—­we must understand each other, lest we bungle.  As the plan was mine, I take the choice of parts.  There is a stain upon my conscience, M’sieu.”  McElroy spoke simply from his heart, as was his wont.  “Throughout this long journey it has lain heavy.  Though I hold against you one grave offence, yet I grieve deeply that it was through my hasty anger you were brought to such sorry plight.  As I am at fault, so would I heal that fault.  This the way I find given me.  When I spring for our friend of the painted feather, do you, M’sieu, waiting for nothing, take to the bush with all the speed there is in you.  And before we part know that, were we free, I would punish you as man to man for that moment before the gate of De Seviere with all pleasure.”

“Ah!  You refer to Ma’amselle Le Moyne?  By what right?”

“By the right of love, whose advances were more than half-reciprocated before the advent of your accursed red flowers,—­the right of man to fight for his woman.”